Leena Rao

She recently finished graduate school at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, where she studied business journalism and videography. From 2004 to 2007, she helped lead Congresswoman Carloyn Maloney's community outreach and relations efforts in New York City. She graduated from Columbia University in 2003, where she was the captain of the women's varsity tennis team. She has also contributed technology content for Oprah.com.

Disclosure: My husband, Suneel Gupta, was previously an employee of Groupon. We hold stock in Facebook. We also have investments in several mutual funds, some of which are technology-focused. And I hold a miniscule amount of shares in AOL, TechCrunch's parent company.

My husband sits on the advisory boards of Adaptly and ToyTalk, and is a shareholder of both companies.

Latest from Leena Rao

Expensify, the startup that took second place at TC50’s demo pit last year, has launched the public beta version of its business expense tracking and reimbursement system. Expensify has created a bigger and better version of its system, which we reviewed last fall.
Expensify still offers the “electronic payment card,” which is essentially an Expensify-branded MasterCard that… Read More

Mobile game advertising network Greystripe secured $5.5 million in Series C funding led by Incubic Venture Capital, Steamboat Ventures and Monitor Ventures. The company previously received a total of $10.1 million in Series A and B funding, with the same investors participating. Greystripe develops “advergames,” mobile ads that have game-like characteristics designed to increase… Read More

Foodoro, a new Y Combinator startup launching today, is an online marketplace for specialty artisanal foods. The site allows foodies to ship items like sesame nut spice chocolate and Mountain Jasmine Green Pearl Tea, to themselves or friends and family. The site offers a variety of hard-to-find food items from 54 vendors across the country, ranging from California cheese makers to… Read More

Startup JD Supra is hoping to merge user generated content with the legal community. Founded by attorney Aviva Cuyler and launched last year, the site enables lawyers, law firms, and legal professionals to publish legal documents online. The source is credited for his or her work via a LinkedIn-like profile on the site. Access is free and anyone can search the database of memos, court… Read More

Fantasy sports site RotoHog secured $2 million in Series B funding from by VC funds Mission Ventures and DFJ Dragon. Founded in 2006, RotoHog operates and develops custom branded fantasy sports games for clients such the NBA.com, LG Electronics, GoDaddy.com, Pro Football Weekly, and Turner Digital, among others. RotoHog previously received $1.8 million in seed and angel funding from Allen… Read More

Global mobile payments network Paymo and social network hi5 have partnered to let members in 24 countries use their mobile phones to purchase hi5 Coins, hi5’s virtual currency. Countries where Paymo will be made available to hi5 users include the U.S., Canada, France, Hong Kong, Thailand, Russia and Colombia.
Paymo’s mobile payment system doesn’t require users to have a… Read More

Jive Software has launched a comprehensive Social Business Software application suite, Jive SBS 3.0, which includes the company’s previous social computing applications, Clearspace and Clearspace Community. The Clearspace applications, whose names will cease to exist but functionalities will remain the same, will be integrated into one social enterprise platform.
Modeled to offer… Read More

VC firm Highland Capital Partners is issuing a call for applicants for their 3rd annual “Summer@Highland” entrepreneurship program. Highland is trying to tap into the same early-stage, young talent pool as start-up incubators like Y Combinator and TechStars.
Highland’s 10 week program is only open to enrolled graduate and undergraduate students or recent graduates (no later… Read More

Media search engine Technorati is about to release The Technorati Attention Index, which measures the mainstream media websites with the highest number of blogs linking to them in the past 30 days. Right now it has a blog post with the inaugural list. YouTube takes the top spot with the New York Times, BBC News, CNN.com, and MSN rounding out the top five. Compared to the top non-blog sources… Read More

Angel and VC funding platform Angelsoft has launched an investor filtering tool, allowing entrepreneurs the ability to access detailed profiles on over 1,000 venture capital firms and angel investment groups in the U.S. Angelsoft allows startups to “push” their business ideas to over 400 angel investment groups and 15,949 investors across the world. The site formerly focused on… Read More

ZoomInfo, a popular business information search engine used to find information about industries, companies and people is partnering with Microsoft to integrate its search engine into Microsoft‘s Dynamic CRM platform. ZoomInfo’s search engine has proven to be a useful tool to incorporate into CRMs because its research capabilities help identify new sales leads, expand data on… Read More

Swan Island Networks provides flexible, high-trust cloud computing platforms catered for security-conscious enterprises and government entities. Cloud computing is all the rage among big businesses but government entities, whether they be local, state or federal, have been more reluctant to jump on the bandwagon (or should we say, cloud).
Charles Jennings, CEO of Swan Island Networks, said… Read More

This week’s elevator pitch comes from Valu Valu, an online marketplace of video games whose prices are based on dynamic scientific pricing, creating the optimal price for both the seller and the buyer. The pitch was concise and outlined the service the the site is delivering well didn’t tell us how Valu Valu will make money. After doing a little bit of research, we discovered that… Read More

Facebook fbFund winner Wildfire is launching the private beta of its web application, The Wildfire Promotion Builder, which allows companies to create their own branded interactive promotions, including contests, coupons, sweepstakes and giveaways. Using Facebook Connect combined with the power of the application, companies can simultaneously publish promotion campaigns on the designated… Read More

Yesterday, I attended the Churchill Club‘s program addressing “The Innovation Economy: R&D and a Crisis.” The panelists included Josephine Chang, an IBM Fellow and Vice President of IBM Almaden Research Center; renowned innovation expert and former Cisco CTO Judy Estrin; Rick Rashid, a senior vice president of research at Microsoft; VC executive Sue Siegel, a partner at… Read More

Reid Hoffman is an entrepreneur’s entrepreneur. He worked at Paypal, founded LinkedIn, and invested in dozens more. Last night, he appeared on Charlie Rose, where he talks about the rise of social networking in general, and LinkedIn’s success in particular (it is adding one million professionals every 17 days and is emerging as a “low cost provider of really good hiring… Read More

Google is using its Moderator product to help people share ideas on how to save money in recessionary times. Moderator is a tool that helps groups determine which questions should be asked at all-hands meetings, conferences, and online Q&A sessions, among other scenarios. Google has set up a site called Tip Jar, which is powered by Moderator, to gathers money-saving tips in one place… Read More

If you are looking to do some quick competitive analysis, a new site called BizShark offers a wealth of data about companies. Bizshark is a nifty automated information aggregator. It pulls together the latest business profiles, news, financials, web analytics, social footprint, marketing strategies, and other business information by searching across more than 50 Internet business databases. Read More

OneRiot, a social search engine that launched late last year, doesn’t want to replace Google search mechanism, it just wants to offer web users another option. OneRiot produces search results based on what the greater public is viewing pertaining to a particular subject. This non-traditional search engine adds a social lens to the search experience, measuring what people are talking… Read More